The Jealous One Read online

  The Jealous One

  CELIA FREMLIN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Copyright

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.

  One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.

  Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?

  Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls, and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.

  She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book War Factory (1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.

  In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a ‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of Women’s Own, Punch and the London Mystery Magazine. However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:

  The original inspiration for this book was my second baby. She was one of those babies who, perfectly content and happy all day, simply don’t sleep through the night. Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by lack of sleep; my eyes would fall shut while I peeled the potatoes or ironed shirts. I remember one night sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my baby awake and lively in my arms it dawned on me: this is a major human experience, why hasn’t someone written about it? It seemed to me that a serious novel should be written with this experience at its centre. Then it occurred to me – why don’t I write one?

  The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.

  Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing Uncle Paul in 1960 and Seven Lean Years in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover, The Hours Before Dawn and The Trouble-Makers have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’

  *

  By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.

  In 1969 she published a novel entitled Possession. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the terrible even
ts of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching Possession today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970) Fremlin did not publish again until Appointment With Yesterday (1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements. The Long Shadow (1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.

  Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called Duet in Verse which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was King of the World (1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’

  Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base and Possession right up to her penultimate novel The Echoing Stones (1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.

  To revisit the Celia Fremlin oeuvre now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.

  Chris Simmons

  www.crimesquad.com

  CHAPTER I

  Rosamund would never have believed that so confused a dream could yet be so vivid. There had been no sense of struggle, for her savagely pushing hands had seemed to meet with no resistance, as is the way of dreams. The blind rage had seemed simply to disintegrate, to become a wild wind blowing, a whirling panorama of stars in a black sky, a throbbing of mighty sound, as of waves crashing with frightful nearness. And there, in the thunderous centre of it all, had been Lindy’s hated, beautiful face, hurtling away into the darkness. Lindy’s face, ugly and terrified at last!—the dream-Rosamund had registered, with terrible dream-glee; and even in the very moment of waking, the glee remained—a dreadful, pitiless exaltation. ‘I’ve won! I’ve won!’ she began to cry aloud—but, after all, it wasn’t a cry at all: just a painful rasp of sound in her sore, aching throat. The thunder of unknown seas narrowed itself down to a dull throbbing in her own head; the star-seared darkness became the chequered light from the street lamp on the walls of her bedroom, where night seemed to have already fallen while she slept.

  Of course. I’ve got ’flu, Rosamund remembered. No wonder I’m having extraordinary dreams. Through the throbbing in her head, the roaring in her ears, she tried to sit up … to remember…. And now, as she raised herself, it was forced upon her reviving consciousness that she was not properly in bed at all, but just lying on top of the eiderdown, fully dressed. And she was cold, icily cold. She must have flopped down here exhausted after finishing the essential housework this morning—or was it early afternoon?

  I wonder if I’ve still got a temperature? she mused dazedly and reached out towards the bedside lamp. With the sudden glare of light, full reality ought to have been switched on too; and yet her recent dream seemed to cling about her still, even as she sat up. Her whole brain, her body itself, seemed still to throb with the terrible triumph of her dream victory; she felt again that incandescent flash of evil joy as she watched Lindy hurtling to disaster—her beauty, her sweetness, her serenity, about to be eclipsed for ever.

  Oh, the glory of it! Oh, the perfect, exquisite pay-off, fierce and unarguable, like the dream wind whistling and screaming through her hair!

  For a moment Rosamund was almost in the dream again; but she forced her eyes open once more onto the circle of bright, real light, took the thermometer from its case, and put it into her mouth.

  What had her temperature been this afternoon? She couldn’t remember—couldn’t, indeed, remember having taken it at all, though she must have, else how could the thermometer have been lying here, all ready, beside the bed?

  How sad it was, it suddenly occurred to her, to be lying here, all alone, taking one’s own temperature every four hours! As she reclined against the pillows, waiting immobilised for the appointed two minutes, Rosamund allowed herself, as a sort of invalid’s treat, to be flooded by self-pity. A year ago—even six months ago—it wouldn’t have been like this. A year ago Geoffrey would have been anxious about her, full of sympathy and affection. He would have noticed first thing in the morning that she was ill, and would have fussed and worried delightfully; bringing her breakfast in bed, dashing home in his lunch hour to see how she was; and by now he would have cooked her a dainty little meal, and over the bedside light he would have draped his old red scarf to protect her eyes from the glare. The last time she had been ill he had done this, and she remembered how she had lain lapped in rosy light, cradled triumphant in her illness, like a queen upon her throne.

  The aching in her head grew worse as she blinked back the slow, dull tears, half stupefied by her longing for Geoffrey. Not Geoffrey as he was now—polite, and dutiful, and ill at ease—but Geoffrey as he had been once—Geoffrey as he had been through all the long years until Lindy came to live next door.

  Half past nine, and he still wasn’t in! How heartless he was! As part of her solitary little treat, Rosamund was allowing herself to be unreasonable, too, as well as self-pitying. Because it was unreasonable, she knew it was, to expect Geoffrey to cancel his late night when he didn’t even know she was ill.

  But he should have known, protested the spoilt, childish bit of Rosamund’s mind, and she sucked at the thermometer like a baby sucking at a dummy, for comfort without sustenance. He shouldn’t have been so easily deceived when she pretended she was perfectly well this morning, and got up as usual and began bustling round the kitchen. He should have seen she was forcing herself to it—driving herself to the limits of her strength in order not to play the part of the malingering wife—the wife who manufactures an illness in the hopes of recapturing through pity what she can no longer claim through love.

  And it’s not fair, I really was ill, there was no question of malingering, thought Rosamund, weakly indignant. As if her temperature would provide the final answer to all her problems, she whipped the thermometer from her mouth and peered at it under the light, twisting and turning it this way and that to b
ring the magical silver thread into existence … the little silver messenger from another world … he loves me … he loves me not….

  Nearly 102°. Rosamund was pleased that her temperature was so high. It sort of accounted for—well, everything. For feeling so depressed and ill-used: for thinking that Geoffrey ought to be back already when he wasn’t: and for having had that awful dream about poor Lindy. Fancy dreaming of pushing Lindy off a cliff or whatever it was—yes, it must have been a cliff because of the waves crashing and the wind howling—and then being so pleased about it—not the least bit shocked or frightened, as you would be in real life if you found you’d murdered a neighbour you disliked.

  Disliked? Well, she did dislike Lindy, of course; hated her often. Who wouldn’t, in her situation? But—and this was really what had made it all so peculiarly painful—her dislike had never succeeded in blinding her entirely to Lindy’s many virtues. Lindy was fun; she was gay, and vital, and full of originality. She could often be kind, too, in her own way, every now and then showing a surprising degree of shrewd understanding for those in trouble. You could not even say that she had deliberately set out to hurt Rosamund, or deliberately tried to break up her marriage. And indeed she wasn’t breaking it up. What was happening was something much slighter than that—much more difficult to put into words. Just a look in Geoffrey’s face, really; a sort of buoyancy in his voice when he embarked on a sentence into which he was going to bring Lindy’s name; a way of glancing at Lindy’s house instead of at his own as he unlatched the front gate in the evenings.

  But none of it was Lindy’s fault, anyway. It never was the other woman’s fault really, Rosamund assured herself, with fierce modernity. It was the wife’s fault, always, if she so failed to please her husband that he was driven for solace to some other woman. If she was to hate anyone for the present situation, it would be more reasonable to hate herself, Rosamund reflected … and then, once again, the feeling of the dream washed over her, and she knew that reasonableness didn’t come into it at all, never had and never could. The voice of reason was thin and tiny, like a caged canary chirping, among the savage thunders of her dream. The sense of mortal struggle was back with her again … the clutching, desperate hands … the joy of victory. How real, how vivid, fever can make a mere dream …!